It's still around, but mostly in the form of basement shows and pretty much everything on Goner Records. If you want to see the true spirit of Punk that's literally aged well, check out Pierced Arrows (or their former band Dead Moon.)

It was weird because I went and saw X when they first reunited back in 2006 or so, and the sound quality was shit and so were they, but I was in the front in the middle of one of the greatest pits I've ever been in. I saw them again in 2010, I think, and it was assigned seating, and in lieu of an opening band, they just screened the documentary about X. They sounded great but I kinda wanted to leave because it just didn't feel like punk.

A lot of the new bands don't necessarily refer to themselves as "punk" anymore than a writer of sad songs refers to themselves as "emo," but as an aesthetic punk's not dead. It's just hiding.

Punk morphed into metal in the '80s, or maybe metal became more punk. By the late '80s, it was hard to tell the difference between a hardcore band and a thrash band, and the kids who grew up listening to crust took that formula to its logical conclusion and created a new genre (grindcore). After that, any band that called itself punk was either a watered-down MTV version of the real thing (Green Day and The Offpsring being the best examples of that) or a retro retread.

Wasn't punk just a bunch of kids trying to make rock dangerous again at a time when you had to work your ass off to get your music heard? Now all you need to do is plug some stuff into your computer, record yourself, and upload the results to a web page. The process is too neat and tidy for anything like punk to emerge again and the main method of distribution is instantly global. All of the components needed for a scene are absent.

Yeah.. a good example of that was Wavves. Like him or not, he got lucky, recording an entire album's worth of material with Garageband or something and releasing it himself. Within 3 months or so he was the new indie (punk/lofi whatever you wanna call it) darling and was playing big festivals. Same goes for Bon Iver. But for every one of those success stories, there are thousands of bands toiling away at tiny bars and basements that host music. My favorite punk band right now circumnavigates all those channels (no band camp, just a facebook page with no music) and they play, like me, for their beer and maybe a half-tank of gas moneywise for sometimes 15 people or less. Like, these guys are my friends and I would post a link to their music but I can't. That's keeping it pretty punk if you ask me.

I posted a trailer for a film called Spokanarchy on here some time ago, and that's another perfect example. Spokane Washington had this huge punk scene that was completely isolated and they liked it that way.